Well SMS is verifiable in theory because it has the central telephone service provider that it is routed through. Very few hands touch that message and you can only receive message from one source and only send them to one source, that one source does all the verification. Similar argument for IMs. Blogs typically require a log-in controlled by a central authority and so unless your owned, its verifiable that what you posted is yours and comments by friends are theirs. Email on the other hand doesnt require any authentication, can be recieved and sent to millions of different locations, it has no central authority (which is good for many things, but bad for auth). I could send you an email right now with your mom's email address and it'd be very hard to prove it wasn't your mom, yet alone trace it back to me. I personally only use email,and the occasional IM, but this guy does have a point. And of course anything formal is a physical document.Regards,Steve

The cheating via SMS for university entrance exams was uncovered, and investigated. Teens in SK cannot live without the cell phone, especially SMS, that's the major communication device quick and easy.

I hate to say this but you can safely ignore anything Chosun Ilbo brags in their so-called 'tech' section. it's nothing but corporate PR stunt.
IMHO ETNews [etnews.co.kr] is far more reliable source of tech news in Korea.
(And yes, I'm a Korean)

I realize you can't generalize based on your own anecdotal experience... but does anyone really send one or two-line emails anymore when IM is a hundred percent easier and instantaneous?

There's no doubt that IMing (et al) is huge over here, but a lot of that has to do with the big cell phone culture amongst the youth. They've streamlined it so that it's really easy to send messages to friends and whatnot. But you can also listen to music on cellphones over here as well. Does that mean Korea's going to replace all its stereo equipment with cellphones? You can take pictures with cellphones as well. Does that mean professional studios are going to give up their equipment and start doing portraits with cellphones? Maybe it's comparing apples and oranges, I don't know, but so long as electronic documents need to be looked at, people are going to need workstations or laptops. And so long as these are around, email's going to be a viable way to communicate.

It's not so much that email is on the wane that I'm skeptical about, it's the idea that email is only for old people. For instance, while I don't know from personal experience from having worked in a Korean company, I have a hard time believing that IMing (et al) is going to usurp email for business communications anytime soon.

We've blocked every IP block from Korea at the router level. The level of spam originating from their IP space is simply astronomical. Maybe if their telcos got their act together, more of their citizens who might want to contact people outside the country might be able to do so. Otherwise, I suspect the reason most people don't use e-mail is because it's completely unreliable due to spammers taking over their networks and being RBL'd.

In America, e-mail is more widely used because it has a longer history. It's been around since the beginning of the Internet, and e-mail was a much better method of communication during the dial-up era. If you're getting charged by the minute (which is what used to happen on dial-up), you want to download your e-mail, read it offline, compose replies (still offline), then connect to send them so that you're not getting charged for nothing. Even after broadband became more popular (and dial-up cheaper), e-mail remained popular because it was well established.

In Korea, Internet access exploded onto the scene with broadband access almost from the start. Imagine a situation where barely anybody uses the Internet, and then one day everybody's on a DSL or cable connection. Also imagine that these users have never been exposed to e-mail. Sure, some of them will use e-mail (especially in the academic circle), but most of the users will be drawn to the communications applications that are more interactive, less boring(?), and require more bandwidth. E-mail just has that much less of an established reputation in such a situation.

Another eason may be cultural. E-mail is time consuming (compared to cell phones or IM), and it is a much more private medium. Koreans are very impatient, and they are also a very community-oriented nation of people. E-mail just doesn't cut it for these types of people, since you never know how long it'll take to get a reply back. Message boards, blogs, IM, and cell phone conversations do, however, satisfy the need for instant communication and community-oriented communication.

The slashdot blurb is but a single sentence and yet you managed to not notice the part that says "email is used only for formal communications". Which part of messages to judges or opposing council for serious matters is not a formal communication?

And four other people with stunningly limited attention spans rated you "interesting" for this question!!!